Individuals and/or organizations that are chartered with the responsibility to study one or more markets typically enjoy a vast amount of market data on which strategic decisions may be based. Such data may be located in any number of local, regional, and/or global databases to provide information related to demographics, purchasing behavior, sales figures, seasonal sales influences, and/or sales promotion activities. Market researchers and category development professionals may also have access to one or more business applications that process such market data in a particular manner to facilitate an understanding of certain market activities.
Each business application may be directed to a focused aspect of the market and employ one or more analysis methods to market data that yields, for example, market summary data related to one or more specific facets of the market of interest, a product of interest within the market, and/or a service of interest. In other words, each business application typically executes one or more tailored methods to acquire market data and apply one or more analysis techniques to the data to yield one or more results related to a business facet of interest to the market researcher.
However, the number of available databases containing market information is typically large, and a corresponding large number of business applications exist to process such market information to yield one or more particular results. The number of disparate data sources and applications may become overwhelming for a market researcher who, prior to obtaining market result(s) from the one or more applications, may require significant research efforts and/or studying of the applications to become familiar with their associated capabilities, strengths, and/or weaknesses.